IMPARJA: Asset Management for Commercial Orders

Etere Air Sales is the most complete and versatile solution in the broadcast and media market for traffic planning and invoicing, this software solution brings companies with the all the capabilities required to manage multiple networks from a single system.

For more information, please refer to the attachment.

Etere Air Sales allows automating the functions of the Traffic department programming commercial on-air schedules and controlling their contract management.

Introduction
Etere Air Sales is the most complete and versatile solution in the broadcast and media market for traffic planning and invoicing, this software solution brings companies with the all the capabilities required to manage multiple networks from a single system. Etere Air Sales allows automating the functions of the Traffic department programming commercial on-air schedules and controlling their contract management.

Etere Air Sales counts with Orders as the module on charge of entering and planning commercial contracts, providing for this purpose key functions such as an easy contract generation, support of pre and post paid contracts, automatic calculation of taxes, commissions and discounts, booking of commercial space, and a accurate assets assignment.

This paper is aimed to describe how assets involved within commercial orders are managed from their creation to their assignment, including various monitoring features for pointing out ‘missing assets’, ‘unrecorded assets’, etc.

2. HOW TO
This chapter has been written to provide traffic operators with guidelines required for a correct and efficient management of assets during the planning of commercial orders; between the most relevant operations related to the commercial assets management and monitoring the following will be treated on this chapter:

2.1 How to assign an asset to a contract detail
Assets can be easily assigned to orders on compilation time under the Details >>> Scheduling >> Asset section, by pressing the […] button it will be possible to
■ Add: It permits to search for an asset across the Etere database and select one to be linked to the current contract line, the operator will be allowed to:
■ Search for an existing asset:
■ Create a new asset:
■ Add from customer used assets: It allows to link to the current contract line an asset already used in other contracts of the same customer,
■ Delete: Use it to remove the selected asset from the asset list.
Alternatively to this method, it is possible to assign assets to orders after their compilation as explained in the 2.4.3 Assigning assets chapter.

2.2 How to change the code of an asset form
Changing the code of a certain asset is an easy task, it is enough to open the Asset Form module, search for the asset and make double-click on the old code to replace it with a new one, just as shown in the following figure:

Once the new code is entered, press the [Ok] button and then [Save] the asset form; the new code will be updated across the entire system.

2.3 How to check for missing assets on orders
This monitoring task can be easily performed by accessing the Reports module and using any of the two following reports depending on the scheduling status of the orders intended to be monitored:

2.3.1 Missing Materials on All Orders
The Missing Materials on All Orders report permits to generate a document containing a list of all those order details, either scheduled or not, which have still not been associated to an asset. Events included in the report can be grouped by duration and dates; different dates will result in different lines.

Among the filters that permit a custom generation of the report the following parameters are explained:
■ Period: Indicate the period from which missing assets will be retrieved, it is possible to select:
- Today plus the next seven days,
- Next week,
- Custom dates.
■ Order by: Indicate the field to be used as sorting criteria; available fields are 'scheduled time', 'customer', 'agency' and 'Account Executive'.
Once all filters have been selected, press the [Preview] button to generate the report:

2.3.2 Missing Materials on Scheduled Orders
The Missing Materials on Scheduled Orders report allows to produce a document detailing a list of all those order details scheduled to go on-air on a certain period which either have still not been associated to an asset, have still not been scheduled, or its associated asset has still not been recorded. Among the filters that permit a custom generation of the report the following parameters are explained:
■ Period: Indicate the period from which missing assets will be retrieved, it is possible to select:
- Today plus the next seven days,
- Next week,
- Custom dates.
■ Include... : Select at least one status that will be checked in order to generate the report, only those order details meeting this criteria will be retrieved:
- Include M: It will retrieve all those order details which have still not been associated to an asset,
- Include A: It will retrieve all those order details which have still not been scheduled,
- Include R: It will retrieve all those order details which associated asset has still not been recorded.
■ Order by: Indicate the field to be used as sorting criteria; available fields are 'scheduled time', 'customer', 'agency' and 'Account Executive'. Once all filters have been selected, press the [Preview] button to generate the report:

2.4 How to check for orders without linked assets or linked to unrecorded assets
The Assign Asset module, present in the main Etere Air Sales menu allows traffic operators to easily monitor and also link assets to commercials matching a custom set of criteria, among the wide range of possibilities that this module provides, the following can be mentioned:

2.4.1 Display unrecorded assets
Enabling the ‘Only unrecorded assets’ parameter there will be listed all the contracts linked to assets which are not yet recorded for the given period:

Once the [Search] button located in the upper left is pressed, all contract details linked to an unrecorded asset will be listed, by making click on a certain asset it will be possible to see the related asset (which will be displayed with a red balloon that indicates its unrecorded status).

2.4.2 Display orders without linked assets
Enabling the ‘All orders without linked assets’ parameter there will be listed all the contracts which have not yet linked to an asset for the given period:

Once the [Search] button is pressed, all contract details without assets will be listed, and their list of linked assets will be –obviously- empty.

2.4.3 Assigning assets
Making click on a certain retrieved order detail, it will be possible to select between the following three methods for assigning assets:
■ Asset rotation by detail: Use it to use the Asset Change module for assigning assets linked to the order detail in rotational basis. The pool-of-assets will be initially composed by those assets already linked to the current contract detail; however, it will be possible to freely Add/Remove other assets (that will be subsequently added to the detail's linked assets).
■ Asset rotation by order: Use it to use the Asset Change module for assigning assets linked to the entire order (i.e. also from other details of the same order) in rotational basis. The pool-of-assets will be initially composed by those assets already linked to the various details which make the entire contract; however, it will be possible to freely Add/Remove other assets (that will be subsequently added to the order's linked assets).
■ Assigned assets management: Use it to associate (or disassociate) one or more assets to the selected detail(s), being possible to quickly add assets formerly used on other orders for the current customer.